Washington D.C. — In a letter sent to Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum today, an alliance of 111 public‐interest, landowner, Indigenous, and environmental justice organizations urged reconsideration of proposed rulemaking that would open the waters of the continental shelf to offshore carbon dioxide transportation and injection. The letter was facilitated by the environmental organization Food & Water Watch and was signed by groups, including Bold Alliance, For a Better Bayou, Ocean Conservation Research, and Healthy Gulf. 

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) are expected to move forward with rulemaking for RIN: 1082-AA04 in May. 

Advocates chief concerns over the new rule making include, 

• Systemic Land-based carbon dioxide injection well failures;
• Impacts of carbon dioxide leaks on marine ecosystems and water chemistry;
• Potential for offshore freshwater aquifers falling into regulatory gaps; 
• Safety impacts on workers and first responders; 
• Economic damage to coastal fishing and tourism industries;
• Expanding risks to coastal communities from CCS for oil extraction.

The letter, in part, reads: “We ask for a pause in the rulemaking process until tremendous regulatory and oversight gaps are closed to ensure the overall safety of transporting and injecting carbon dioxide, and further ask that you conduct Comprehensive Spatial Planning, as well as an Environmental Impact Statement under the National Environmental Policy Act to evaluate and understand the complex issues related to offshore carbon dioxide injection and transport.” 

“Carbon capture and storage is not about protecting the climate, it’s a dangerous, expensive climate scheme transferring billions of taxpayer dollars to the fossil fuel industry. New proposed rulemaking to open up our waters to CCS is a way to skirt righteous community opposition occurring on land,  further exploit our oceans, and must be stopped in the interest of public and environmental safety,” said Food & Water Watch Policy Director Jim Walsh. “The harms are not well understood, so our government agencies meant to protect our waters must not use public dollars to wreak havoc on fragile ecosystems and vulnerable communities at risk if disaster strikes.”

“Pumping carbon and chemicals beneath the seafloor threatens marine ecosystems, risks contaminating the seafood families rely on, and puts coastal workers and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of harm. The risks to public health and already-fragile ecosystems are real, and once the damage is done there’s no undoing it. Our communities will not be used as collateral damage for industry experiments. For the sake of our public health and communities, we can’t let this stand,” said Mar Zepeda Salazar, Legislative Director, Climate Justice Alliance 

“Ocean-based carbon capture and storage (CCS) is rife with vast uncertainties. It is public policy malpractice to proceed with permitting and building out the vast infrastructure required for ocean CCS when we do not fully understand the risks of piping supercritical CO2 to injection sites in the Ocean. A rupture of a pipeline or a well blowout could prove catastrophic to the ocean, ships and other existing infrastructure,” said Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director, Science and Environmental Health Network. “We do not know the consequences to the ocean and marine life for CO2 leaks, which are hard to detect and monitor. We owe future generations a healthy ocean, a stable climate and strong coastal communities. Ocean CCS threatens all of those.” 

“Louisiana’s offshore waters are not a dumping ground for the fossil fuel industry’s ‘climate’ schemes. The Gulf floor off our coast is riddled with thousands of abandoned and aging oil and gas wells, and each one is a potential escape route for injected CO2 or displaced hydrocarbons. These aren’t hypothetical risks; they are structural realities built into the seafloor over decades of extraction,” said James Hiatt, director, For a Better Bayou. “A blowout or slow leak offshore doesn’t stay offshore; it could harm fisheries, destabilize marine ecosystems, and threaten the coastal communities that depend on a living Gulf. We can not allow regulators to trade one environmental catastrophe for another while calling it climate progress.” 

“Let’s be clear: this reckless, outrageous ploy would shovel billions of our taxpayer dollars into the pockets of ultra-wealthy fossil fuel companies to concentrate the CO₂ pollution they produce—and inject it into our ocean, threatening the health of this life-sustaining resource. No deal. It’s this wacky proposal that needs to be dumped,” said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action.